An Overview of Humans and Autonomy for Military Environments: Safety, Types of Autonomy, Agents, and User Interfaces

The objective of this review is to extract design implications from multiyear US Army sponsored research investigating humans and autonomy. The programs covered diverse research paradigms: (a) effects of autonomy related to pedestrian safety during urban robotic missions, (b) supervision of multiple semi-autonomous robots assisted by an intelligent agent, (c) field investigations of advanced interfaces for hands- free and heads- up supervision of robots for dismounted missions and also investigations of telepresence, (d) effects of haptic control and stereovision for exploiting improvised explosive devices. Thirteen general design guidelines related to mixed initiative systems, pedestrian safety, telepresence, voice control and stereovision/haptic control are discussed.

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